A Perfectly Good Family (25 page)

  Magnolia Johnson was a tall, elegant woman with spindly legs and a remote, collected manner; when Truman shook her narrow hand he crushed it. Her husband George was round-faced and robust; yet his two-jaw smile gleamed with a funny conditionality, as if his gladhanding could turn on a dime. They were both better dressed, I think, than even most well-off whites would have been for a Saturday afternoon real estate foray—Magnolia was wearing a green raw silk suit, tasteful accents of gold jewellery and a sable coat. George's three-piece was tailored to smooth his paunch, and when we shook I noticed his chunky watch was spinning with extra dials. That his tie was of Ghanaian kente cloth had a bit of an in-your-face quality, though George had hardly arrived in a dashiki.

  They were polite but never gushy—they weren't Toms. This part of the country may have come a long way since 1964, but when we opened that door the Johnsons knew very well we were thinking, Oh, fuck, they're black, and we knew they were thinking, That's right, what of it—welcome to the New South, too bad, and watch yourselves, we know the law. Their having rocked up at the McCreas, this subtext was more convoluted still, since Truman and I felt compelled to insinuate you don't understand! We're on your side! Our father was a renowned civil rights advocate! Though somehow from the straight-backed bearing of this couple I suspected we would simply inspire, so what, do you want us to kiss your feet or something? and we would only dig ourselves in a hole.

  Therefore, when George mentioned in his introductions that he was a lawyer, Truman commented, 'Is that right? You must have known our father, then.'

  'Who might that be?'

  'McCrea, of course. Sturges McCrea.' Truman looked expectant.

  George's face remained blank. 'I'm sorry, I—'

  'Sturges Harcourt McCrea,' Truman insisted.

  'Nope,' said George firmly. 'Can't say I had the pleasure. He was—?'

  'Another lawyer,' said Truman, deflating. 'Never mind.'

  The only thing that got up Truman's nose more than all the people he met who remembered his father was meeting someone who didn't.

  'You and your wife the owners?' asked George as Truman led them to the parlour.

'Sister. With one other brother,' said Truman, 'and the ACLU.'

  The Johnsons didn't pick up on this. So much for making points as heart-in-the-right-place white folk.

  Where before we'd been grateful for scattered drinks glasses, smelly socks and stale, overflowing ashtrays, now the shambles embarrassed us. 'Sorry about the mess,' said Truman. 'My brother's a slob.'

  They were duly admiring of the architecture, and Truman warmed. 'This house has a long history of lawyers,' he narrated. 'It was designed in 1872 by G. S. H. Appleget—I've got a picture of him framed upstairs. Carpetbagger, probably got the land for a song, but he was at least good at his job. Designed four other houses in the neighbourhood, but this one's the most magnificent. It was built for Colonel Jonathan Heck, who was a lawyer and an officer, I'm afraid, on the wrong side of the war—what can you do, this is North Carolina. The Heck family sold to A. B. Andrews, another Raleigh lawyer, in 1916, and that's where the house gets its name.'

  Truman had a future on the Capital City Trail. When we reached the kitchen, Magnolia exclaimed, 'Oh, dear, we'd have to do this over, wouldn't we?'

  With a shudder, I had a vision of this room lost to the Johnsons at auction, our criss-crossed wood and tacked-tin counters slapped over with spotless white Formica, the loyal yellowed porcelain sink lost to stainless steel with a disposal; the funky ash cabinets scrapped for walnut veneer with spring closures, the oak floor glued over with E-ZKleen lino. A lot of cold classy equipment, sleek low-slung kettles from Conran's and avant-garde tableware whose spoons you couldn't tell from the forks. The Johnsons wouldn't be nostalgic about Reconstruction.

  When they ducked into the carriage house, Magnolia supposed she'd return the outbuilding to servants' quarters. I sensed a taste for turned tables; I bet Magnolia's maid would be white.

  Truman led them upstairs, and apologized that people were sleeping in four of the bedrooms (it was only 3 p.m.), but we might peek inside. When she ducked her head into the master bedroom, Magnolia cried, 'Pee-yew!' and held her nose.

  Gracious as he'd become, Truman must have got nervous about doing too fine a sell, since on the way to the dovecot he tried to put them off with Gladys Perry.

  'When my parents bought this house it was pretty run down, and I don't think it's ever quite recovered. Gladys Perry was the last owner, some really ancient creature who wore scads of talcum powder; neighbourhood kids thought she was a ghost. She lived by herself and was obsessed with saving money. She became a virtual homeless person in her own house—collecting huge black garbage bags full of you-didn'twant-to-know. The family across North Street say they'd see her shifting these bags back and forth all day; they worried she didn't feed herself, and sometimes left her covered dishes on the porch.

  'Anyway,' he went on, I think to distract them from his beloved dovecot, by which they seemed altogether too charmed, 'one day no one had seen her for a while, and a neighbour called the cops. The police had to break in, and they could hardly move, the place was so cramfull of bags. When they cleared a tunnel to the second floor they found Gladys in bed with frostbite. She'd been too stingy to turn on the heat—'

  'Mother didn't keep the thermostat much higher,' I intruded. I'd always had Gladys Perry in the back of my mind as an image of my mother ageing without Truman to take care of her, getting scattier and cheaper and storing international bric-a-brac in big black bags.

  'The state stuck Gladys in a nursing home, and finally she agreed to sell to my father. I was only two at the time, but he says clearing out those bags was a horror show. The whole place was knee-deep in talcum powder. He never forgave this house for that operation. The smell took ages to dissipate,' he stressed, maybe suggesting that the master bedroom would reek of aquavit and Three Castles for a long time to come.

  'We'd have to cut some skylights,' Magnolia reflected.

  'Oh, no,' said Truman. 'You wouldn't want to do that. The architecture—'

  'At least four, I think. The way you've done this up is quaint, isn't it? But I think we'd knock out these two walls. And the paper is terribly old-fashioned.'

  Truman looked mournfully at the hunting scene whose panels he had painstakingly lined up so the hounds had tails.

  Back downstairs, Magnolia conferred with her husband, but didn't seem to mind if we could hear. 'It would have to be gutted and revamped from the ground up. But the shell has possibili

ties, George. Nairobi would just adore that little tower deck.'

  Truman watched them climb into their Mercedes and whispered, 'House hunters from hell.'

  None of the other parties were black, so we didn't have to be nice to them. The novelty of these tourists wore off, and Truman developed a cursory patter, with no more discursions about Colonel Heck and the Carpetbagger. Instead he hurried them through our lives so they had to jog to keep up, barking, 'Parlour, right? Dining room, right? Kitchen, right?' until by the end they were panting.

  Yet the Johnsons would not display the only gross insensitivity to our thirty years with this structure, about which we might be expected to harbour some sentiment. House-hunting is an imaginative exercise, and solely about the future; other viewers as well seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in their potential to plaster over our past. Chromeand-glass furniture imposed alternative groupings in their eyes; I could see my parents' Indonesian batiks vanish from the walls, slap-dash abstracts popping up over the fireplace. I'd never before considered the fickle nature of property. Heck-Andrews had seemed to cling to us, but no, she would desert for a price and remember us little beyond however much we scarred her. Maybe Mordecai had the ticket after all—by gouging his hand truck down her mahogany panelling, he'd made a more permanent impression than all of Truman's TLC. If the metaphor were extended to people, the precedent was gruesome.

That night, I convened with Truman and Averil in the dovecot, and the atmosphere was like a wake. Truman rose to readjust the frames of Appleget, Heck and Andrews as if to reassert himself, treasuring the fact that Magnolia could not yet rip down his hunting scenes and knock out the back wall.

  'Too bad Father didn't live to see this,' said Truman. 'Real Negroes wanting to buy his house! He'd have paid them.'

  'Don't worry—one way or another,' I promised, 'we'll keep HeckAndrews in this family.'

  'A public auction is unnecessary and all Mordecai's fault.'

  'At least the auction,' said Averil, 'sets a date by which Mordecai has to move out.'

  'Maybe we're going about this all wrong,' I suggested. 'Together you, me and Mordecai own three-quarters of this house; why not share it between us? We're all living here now, aren't we?'

  'You have got to be joking,' said Truman. 'This Three Bears routine is impossible.'

  'It's obviously possible, Truman—we grew up together, in case you've forgotten. And history is full of awkward divisions of territory that last uncannily. Look at Ireland: a "temporary" partition put together in 1921 until they sorted out something more intelligent. No one ever got around to it. They got used to the arrangement instead. I know we've looked at these three weeks as temporary, but all over the world, the temporary becomes the permanent.'

  Averil gripped the couch, her knuckles white. 'Permanent!'

  'Yeah, well in Ireland they're still fighting about it,' Truman snarled.

  'I never said they didn't fight about it. That's one of the things you get used to.'

  'Do you like having all of us here?'

  'Yes,' I admitted. 'But what if splitting the house three ways were the only way for you to keep it at all?'

  'How could that be? You and I will take out a mortgage and buy—'

  'No, what if I refuse to buy the house with you unless Mordecai is in on the deal? What if I said I won't kick my older brother out of his own house?'

  It was to Truman's advantage that my kicking brothers out of houses did not come easily.

  'I'd say you were out of your tree. Besides, Mordecai said he wanted his money. Are you telling me that now he wants to stay?'

  'I'm not sure,' I hedged, 'but he seems to like it here. Don't you ever stop to think that our handing him a cheque and buying him out of the only family he has left might injure him? Just a little?'

  Truman looked at me as if I had just objected that before scouring the sink with Ajax we should stop to consider the feelings of a stain. 'This is just a game to him, how much bother he can subject us to, and how completely he can take over. So far? The sitting room, Father's office, my workshop, the spare bedrooms; half your studio—he thinks he's playing Monopoly. Any day now I expect him to scrap Heck-Andrews and put up a hotel.'

'Mordecai was a pretty sore loser at board games.'

  'He can't throw the pieces all over the room if he isn't in the room. We'll bid as high as we have to, and have him evicted. Bring in the cops, if need be.'

  'On your own brother?'

  'That's what cops are for, your own brother. As for the happy threesome idea, Corlis, no deal.'

  'You're not in a position to deliver me ultimatums, Truman. Controlling interest you don't have.'

  'Neither do you.'

  Controlling interest was exactly what I had.

When I tripped downstairs, any giddy burn I might have felt from flexing my muscles in the dovecot was short-lived. The last thing I ever felt around Mordecai was powerful.

  'Yo, Core,' he ordered. 'Fix me some java, will ya? Make it strong this time. That last pot was like camomile tea. Oh, and I almost forgot—we've got an appointment with some mortgage banker. Monday afternoon, at three. You'll have to wake me up. Bring a hammer.'

  'Mordecai, I've been thinking, we've got to have a talk about all this—'

  'Save it. Monday, we'll do dinner—Karen's, on me. Now, hurry up with that coffee, girl. Get a move on.'

  My margin had narrowed from thin to microscopic. Rather than panic at the prospect of taking out mortgages with two different brothers on the same house, I was actually grateful that the bank appointments were on successive days and not on the same afternoon.

I had always got a child-like buzz out of riding in Mordecai's army truck, so high above the cars, intimidating traffic with that military roar. Commonly surly in what was to him early morning, Mordecai was forcing himself to be matey on my account. Monday was Be Nice to Corlis Day, as Tuesday would be for Truman, yet Mordecai's warmth had a cheap feel to it. I had fleeting sympathy for the rich or influential, having to suffer the synthetic, ulterior kindness of people who want something from you. On the other hand, it works. No matter how often I reminded myself that Mordecai merely needed me for the sake of this mortgage, when he effused that in portfolio photos my sculpture looked 'dynamite' I peered regally out the window and twirled my hair into an impromptu bouffant. If Mordecai ever regarded me as having a life outside full-time sisterhood I was overcome.

  Though Mordecai had worn his slightly less filthy black jeans for the occasion, he'd donned the hard-hat as well, as if in all encounters with authority he expected the powers-that-be to bash him on the head. Peacenik that he had once been, Mordecai approached the least rendezvous as battle.

  He pulled into the Wachovia on Hillsborough, a tiny red-brick Tudor branch that had a doll's house aspect even when we were children. The green-tinted drive-in window had been replaced with an automated teller, but otherwise this was the same bank where all three of us had started our first savings accounts with the vast five dollars we were each given on our tenth birthdays; the gifts were earmarked for Wachovia and not to be squandered on Raisinettes. The ploy succeeded with Truman and me—I have a packrat side; Truman did what he was told. However, the idea of getting Mordecai to start a savings account made me choke. The first thing he did with his passbook was pull the five dollars out.